


a dream is a memory is a ghost

by girlsarewolves



Category: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Nancy has issues, please someone help her, save her from me and my need to write her as constantly dealing with Krueger's shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 06:49:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16300127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/pseuds/girlsarewolves
Summary: There are numerous ways you can be haunted. Ghosts are more than spirits, specters, remnants of someone or something that no longer belongs in this world. There are emotions, feelings - whether understandable or illogical to feel them hovering over you or underneath your skin - they linger like a lost soul, clinging to the living. Memories that can't be forgotten - or maybe can't be remembered - and no matter how much you try to focus on the present, the past keeps pulling you back.Nancy knows very well there are many ways to be haunted. She's experienced them all.





	a dream is a memory is a ghost

* * *

_"Would you consider yourself haunted, Nancy?"_

 

There are numerous ways you can be haunted. Ghosts are more than spirits, specters, remnants of someone or something that no longer belongs in this world. There are emotions, feelings - whether understandable or illogical to feel them hovering over you or underneath your skin - they linger like a lost soul, clinging to the living. Memories that can't be forgotten - or maybe can't be remembered - and no matter how much you try to focus on the present, the past keeps pulling you back.

 

Nancy knows very well there are many ways to be haunted. She's experienced them all.

 

Dreams, like memories, pull and tug at her constantly - like waves washing over her, trying to force her back under into the darkness of sleep, that a bottomless ocean that snuffs out all the light, making it easy for her monsters to hide and wait. Lost souls ready to drag her down into their depths and keep her drowning forever. Dreams - like memories, bringing the past into the present - interrupt her waking world  until the two blend together.

 

Sometimes Nancy wakes up and feels too large, too long, too much skin for prying eyes and greedy fingers. She's five and she's terrified - and then she's nineteen and she's exhausted and repeating over and over, 'I'm awake now, I'm awake now, I'm awake now.'

 

He tells her this world is the dream. He tells her that she is nothing but a ghost - a spirit, a specter, wandering through the motions in a world she does not belong to. He tells her his world  of rusted metal and sticky heat and endless fire orange is the real world - is their world. He tells her every night, every morning, every moment throughout the day that he is able to get through to her, that soon that bottomless ocean will swallow her up, and wash her into his world for good.

 

'You're a ghost,' she calmly tells him.

 

"Would you consider yourself haunted by the past, Nancy?" her therapist asks.

 

Nancy smiles - a hollow, empty thing that is barely more than lips stretched over teeth. "You have no idea."

* * *

 


End file.
